Think Different: Maybe the Web's Not a Place to Stick Your Ads

AdAge: Matthew Creamer Asks Whether We're All Missing the Point When It Comes to the Internet - Should the internet be viewed as an ad medium, a place where brands pay for the privilege of being adjacent to content such as prime-time TV and glossy magazines -- those relics of the pre-blog days, when getting into the media game required infrastructure and distribution?

Matthew Creamer, are you wasting your time at AdAge?
Mr Creamer, you appear to be a sharp tool in the tool box. It's nice that you write this article, it's nice that you talk the talk, but I don't think it will be any time soon before people walk the walk.

You could compare this whole scenario to the music industry and record labels keeping a stranglehold of the way things were. Unfortunately, they are ignoring the fact that consumers aren't hanging around to listen to their dickhead antics and neither are the good music artists.

In our scenario, we have the marketers- all the text books and industry history teaches them what they should do, how consumers behave, how it all works. They ignore that it's all changed. They don't give a crap and it's because if their new campaign fails it's their ass on the line. One marketer once told me that they stick to the same old shit because if it fails they can just say "we'll, that's what we did last year". That sentence deserves a bashing in its own right, but for now it proves a point.

The point that advertising is its own giant ecosystem*. We have the ad providers, creatives, agencies and the marketers. All the cogs work together, people are used to the system - the marketer to the agency to the creative to the agency to the ad providers and all exchanging massive amounts of cash.
Here is a graph of the way things are:

We all know advertising as we know it is ass-up. Ad prices will go down because it's a whole load of bullshit, creatives and agencies who really get it will still be able to charge their premiums because they understand that consumers are in the power seat and you don't need vast amounts of money to get to them. You just need to speak their language and give them something that adds value to their lives.
This value doesn't have to be anything massive, it can be an emotional pull from interacting with a brand device or actually walking away with something for nothing.


It's not brain surgery, it is just advertising! If you get it, you get my twist-and-turn explanation, if you don't, use the graphs.

*ecosystem used here in a valid and logical fashion, i.e. a non wanker way.